I'm in the middle of (or should currently be) conducting a literature review for my last (official!) grad course. I decided to add on to my current lit review on SLA in the secondary classroom. Initially I examined the research on best practices in promoting SLA. Guess what I found? TPRS/CI is the way to go. Duh! :)
But this time I wanted to see how student motivation played a factor in the classroom. I believe that students who do not succeed in others' classrooms, sometimes succeed in mine (and vice versa) due to motivation-related factors.
Why did I write this blog post? Well I wanted to share two things that I am finding:
1) Anxiety and motivation are very closely related. As anxiety increases in students, motivation decreases along with achievement.
2) Much of the research on the topic of motivation (and subsequently anxiety) in the SLA process is coming from Asia because of reforms in language teaching mandated by the government. Specifically, Japan has initiated several major reforms at the high school level which aims to replace the grammar-translation approach to teaching. Go Japan!
Japan's progress makes me salivate; and the correlation between anxiety, motivation and achievement seems so obvious, but if it were so obvious to others (eh hum, administrators?) then the research wouldn't be needed.
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